> On May 27, 2016, at 3:25 PM, Fred Cisin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> ...
> Anyway, back to, . . .
> Clancy and Harvey reworked the UC undergraduate lower division (first two
> years) curriculum. They setup a three course sequence at the core,
> consisting of "Abstraction", "Data Structures", and "Demystification". They
> called a meeting of local CS departments to tell us what we should switch
> over to teaching.
Those first two titles sound reasonable. The third sounds strangely
touchy-feely rather than like an engineering course.
> ...
> They declared, "Nobody programs in Assembly language any more, nor ever will
> again."
> ...
> They had a brilliant visionary concept of CS education.
I would not put it that way. "Brilliant" is a term of praise, as is
"visionary".
Someone who claims that "nobody programs in assembly language any more nor will
ever again" does not merit those adjectives. The correct adjectives would be
"ignorant" and "myopic". Those are the correct terms because their assertion
is valid only if you limit yourself to a limited class of programmers, and
ignore compiler writers, diagnostics programmers, BIOS engineers, bootloader
programmers, or embedded systems developers, just to name a few.
I'm surprised that such people would be working at a supposedly highly regarded
outfit like Berkeley.
paul
